gentle clank of the fence, no movement in the black-
ness.
He glanced back as John thumped to the cold and
dusty ground, then nodded toward the front struc-
ture, the smaller one. If he were to design a false
cover, he'd hide the real entrance somewhere no one
would look - in a broom closet at the back of the last
building, through a trap door in the dirt, but Um-
brella was cocky, too smug to worry about such
simple precautions.
It will be in the first building, because they'll believe
they've hidden it so cleverly that no one will find it.
Because if there's one thing we can count on, it's that
Umbrella thinks they're too smart to be caught out...
He hoped. Staying down, David started for the
building, praying that if there were cameras watching
them, there was no one watching the cameras.
It was late, but Reston wasn't tired. He sat in the
control room, sipping brandy from a ceramic mug
and idly thinking about the next day's agenda.
He'd make his report, of course; Cole still hadn't
managed to fix the intercom system, although the
video cameras all seemed to be in working order; the
Ca6 handler, Les Duvall, wanted one of the mechan-
ics to see about a sticking lock on the release cage -
- and there was still the city. The MaSKs couldn't
exactly shine if the only colors were tan and brick . . .
. . . have to get the construction people into Four tomorrow. And see how the Avis do with the perches.
A red light flashed on the panel in front of him,
accompanied by a soft mechanical bleat. It was the
sixth or seventh time in the last week; he'd have to get
Cole to fix that, too. The winds sweeping off the plain
could be vicious; on a bad day, they rattled the doors
to the surface structures hard enough to set off all of
the sensors.
Still, good thing I was here... once the Planet was fully staffed, there'd always be someone in control to
reset the sensors, but for the time being, he was the
only one with access to the control room. If he'd been
in bed, the soft but insistent alarm currently going off
in his private room would have forced him to get up.
Reston reached for the switch, glancing at the row
of monitors to his left more for form's sake than
because he expected to see anything...
... and froze, staring at a screen that showed him
the entry room nearly a quarter mile above where he
sat, in a view from the ceiling cam in the southeast
corner. Four, five people, turning on flashlights, all of
them dressed in black. The thin beams of light
roamed over the dusty consoles, the walls of meteoro-
logical equipment - and illuminated the weapons
they were holding in flashes of metal. Guns and rifles.
Oh, no.
Reston felt almost a full second of fear and despair
before he remembered who he was. Jay Reston had
not become one of the most powerful men in the
country, perhaps in the world, by panicking.
He reached beneath the console, reached for the
slender handset tucked into the slot next to the chair
that would connect him directly to White Umbrella's
private offices. As soon as he picked it up, the line went through.
"This is Reston," he said, and could hear the steel in his voice, hear it and feel it. "We have a problem. I want a call put in to Trent, I want Jackson to call me
immediately - and send out a team, now, I want
them here twenty minutes ago."
He stared at the screen as he spoke, at the intruders,
and clenched his jaw, his initial fear turning to anger.
The fugitive S.T.A.R.S., surely...
It didn't matter. Even if they found the entrance,
they didn't have the codes - and whoever they were,
they would pay for causing him even a second of
distress.
Reston slid the phone back into its slot, folded his
arms, and watched the strangers move silently across
the screen, wondering if they had any idea that they'd
be dead within half an hour.
SEVEN
THE BUILDING WAS COLD AND DARK, BUT
there was the soft hum of working machinery to break
the silence, to listen to over the pounding of her heart.
It wasn't too big, maybe thirty feet by twenty, but it
was a single room, big enough to feel unsafe, vulnera-
ble. Small lights blinked randomly all around it, like
dozens of eyes watching them from the shadows.
Man, I hate this.
Rebecca trailed the tight beam from her flashlight
over the west wall of the building, looking for any-
thing out of the ordinary and trying not to feel sick at
the same time. In movies, private detectives and cops
who had just crashed someone's house were always
strolling calmly around, looking for evidence, as if
they owned the place; in real life, breaking in some-
where you were absolutely not supposed to be was
terrifying. She knew they were in the right, that they
were the good guys, but still her palms were damp, her
heart hammering, and she wished desperately there
were a bathroom she could get to. Her bladder had
apparently shrunk to the size of a walnut.
And it'll have to wait, unless I want to go wet the dirt
in enemy territory . . . Rebecca didn't.
She leaned in to take a closer look at the machine in
front of her, a stand-up device the size of a refrigera-
tor and covered with buttons; the label on the front
read, "OGO Relay," whatever that was. As far as she
could tell, the room was full of big, clunky machines
awash in switches; if all of the other buildings were
similarly equipped, finding Trent's hidden code panel
was going to be an all-night operation.
Each of them had taken a wall, and John was going
over the tables in the middle of the room. There was
probably a surveillance camera set up somewhere in
the building, which made the need to hurry even
greater - although they were all hoping that the mini-
mal staff meant no one would be watching. If they were very lucky, the security system wouldn't even be
hooked up yet.
No, that would be a miracle. Lucky will be if we get
in and out of this alive and unhurt, with or without that
book...
Since they'd walked away from the van, Rebecca's
internal alarms had been ticking down to a full-blown
case of the nerves. From her short time with the
S.T.A.R.S. she'd learned that trusting her gut feelings
was important, maybe even more important than
having a weapon; instinct told people to duck bullets,
to hide when the enemy was near, to know when to
wait and when to act.
The problem is, how do you know if it's instinct or if
you're just scared shitless? She didn't know. What she knew was that she wasn't feeling good about their
late-night raid; she was cold and jumpy, her stomach
hurt, and she couldn't shake the belief that something
bad was going to happen.
On the other hand, she should be scared - they all
should be; what they were doing was dangerous.
Something bad might actually happen, acknowledg-
ing it wasn't paranoid, it was realistic -
- Hello. What's that?
Just to the right of the OGO machine was some-
thing that looked like a water heater, a tall, rounded
device with a window in the front. Behind the small
square of glass was a spool of graph paper, covered
with thready black lines, nothing she recognized,
what had caught her eye was the dust on the glass. It
was the same finely powdered dirt that seemed to be
on everything in the room . . . except it wasn't. There
was a smudge across the dirt, a damp streak that may
have been caused by someone's finger.
A smudge on dirt?
If someone had run their hand over the dusty glass,
they would have cleared a path. Rebecca touched it,
frowning - and felt the pebbled surface of the dust,
the tiny ridges and whorls like sandpaper beneath her
fingers. It was painted or sprayed on - that is, fake.
"Might have something," she whispered, and
touched the window where the smudge was. The
window popped open, swinging out
and there was a sparkling metal square behind it,
a ten-key set into an extremely undusty-looking panel;
the graph paper was also fake, just a part of the glass.
"Bingo," John whispered from behind her, and Rebecca stepped back, feeling a flush of excitement as
the others gathered around, feeling the tension com-
ing from all of them. The mist of their combined
breath made a small cloud in the freezing room, reminding her of how cold she was.
Too cold ... we should go back to the van, back to
the hotel for a hot bath. She could hear the desper- ation in her inner voice. It wasn't the cold, it was this
place.
"Brilliant," David said softly, and stepped forward, holding his flashlight up. He'd memorized Trent's
codes, eleven in all, each eight digits long.
"It'll be the last one, watch," John whispered.
Rebecca might have laughed if she wasn't so scared.
John fell silent as they watched him plug in the first
numbers, Rebecca thinking that if they didn't work
she wouldn't be all that disappointed.
Jackson had called, informing Reston in his cool,
cultured tones that two four-man teams were on
their way by helicopter from Salt Lake City. "It so happens that our branch office was entertaining a few
of the troops," he'd said. "We have Trent to thank for that; he suggested that we start relocating some of
our security in advance of the grand opening, so to
speak."
Reston had been glad to hear it, but wasn't so happy
about the fact that they were there, three armed men
and two women poking around the Planet's entrance
in the middle of the night...
"They can't get in, Jay," he'd interrupted, gently, soothingly. "They don't have access."
Reston had swallowed his knee-jerk response to
that, thanking him instead. Jackson Cortlandt was
probably the most patronizing and arrogant son of a
bitch Reston had ever known, but he was also ex-
tremely competent and extremely savage if need be;
the last man who'd crossed Jackson had been mailed
to his family in pieces. Saying "No shit" to the senior
member was akin to walking off a tall building.
Jackson had then made it quite clear that while he
appreciated the call, it would be best for Jay to handle
such matters himself in the future - that if he'd
bothered to keep himself apprised of internal shift-
ings, he would have known about the teams in SLC.
There was no explicit wrist-slapping, but Reston got
the message all the same; he hung up feeling as though
he'd been severely chastised; watching the five inter-
lopers search the entry building only added to his
mounting tension.
No codes, no access, even if they find the controls.
Twenty minutes. All he had to do was wait for
twenty minutes, half an hour at the outside. Reston
took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly...
... and forgot to inhale again as he saw one of them,
a girl, push on the window to the keypad. They'd found it, and he still didn't know who they were or
how they knew about the Planet - but the way one of
the men stepped forward and started punching keys
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